2/20/2005

EU: Malice Through Apathy

His Imperial Majesty Misha I has two posts up about the European Union today. The first is about their continued opposition to DDT use against mosquitos in Africa, despite the staggering rate of malaria in African countries. (Roughly two million Afrians die each year from malaria, nearly all of them children or pregnant women.) The second is about the abysmal turnout for the Spanish EU referendum. Apparently, turnout was only 42%, of which 77% voted for the new EU Constitution. Meanwhile, over 90% of Spaniards know almost nothing about the Constitution or what is in it. (Which makes one wonder why they would vote for it...)

Money quote:

Madrid university professor Pedro Schwartz, on his way to vote, told the BBC: "Like most Spaniards, I'm pro-European, but it's the wrong time for a constitution.

"I know that, because I'm about the only one in Spain to have read it."

Does one thing have to do with the other? I wonder. How is it possible that the EU can continue to force poor, disease-ridden Africa to avoid using genetically-modified grain, or DDT pesticides that would kill off the mosquitos that are ravaging entire populations? How is it possible that the EU can continue to subsidize its own agriculture industry, at the expense of Africa's? (The same could be said about the United States, except that President Bush has courageously called for our subsidies to be slashed. Whether such a move will make it through Congress is another matter.)

Certainly there must be some degree of malice on the part of the EU leadership. Misha calls the present situation a "genocide-by-proxy scheme," and I see little reason to doubt him. But is the general populace of Europe equally malicious towards Africa? I don't think so. I may be wrong, but I think the problem is simply that Europeans don't take the time to find out what the situation in Africa is really like. They rely instead on Big Media organizations that are either government-controlled, or else ideologically driven. If it's not on the front page, it simply doesn't register for most people.

The alternative view is that people know what's going on, but have no way to influence the inner workings of the EU, which rivals the Soviet Communist Party for sheer bureaucratic unaccountability. The EU remains an organization of appointees, with some token gestures towards keeping the elected Parliament busy with meaningless trifles.

With luck, it is this very unaccountability that will bring the EU down. The Eastern European nations particularly are discovering that they are now subject to thousands of onerous regulations that are stifling their economy. France, meanwhile, is employing the EU as a club against its economic competitors; there was a proposal some time back to force all EU states to have a minimum taxation level, which just happened to be near that of France, so as not to provide "unfair" competition for companies in highly-taxed states like France or Germany. Such moves have Poland especially hopping mad.

Meanwhile, Africans are dying because of Eurodruids in Brussels. Does anyone know why we don't call that a crime against humanity?